So ...you wanna score?

I've just run last night's performance by a little program called, "Comedy Evaluator Pro"; it's featured on the documentary, "I Am Comic", which was released on January 28th of this year. It's a simple program, and gives a 'PAR' (Positive Audience Response) score for any recorded production. It breaks your routine down on a minute by minute basis, giving you not just the number of laughs per minute, but also the duration of each audience response. This is the first time I've tried it, and, it is to 'read 'em and weep'!



My PAR score for the 'Kinky' set was an overall 28, with the average seconds of laughter per minute being 17, and a total of 170 seconds of laughter in ten minutes. That's not bad per se, in fact it is regarded as a competent comic performance. What is disconcerting is that I’d timed my presentation at home to about 6 minutes and 40 seconds, giving pauses where I expected laughs. But, I went 2 minutes over my allotted time; that’s not accounted for by amount of laughter I received. I wasn’t rehearsed sufficiently, and it showed in my pauses and hesitations while grasping for my material; that I will have to work on.



Minute            Number of laughs           Seconds of laughter

1                     2                                     4

2                     2                                     7

3                     6                                     17

4                     7                                     15

5                     5                                     17

6                    10                                    34

7                    4                                      7

8                    3                                      12

9                    7                                      29

10                  8                                      28

For whatever reason, minutes 6, 9 and 10 really cooked; any minute with less than 15 seconds of audience response is of dubious worth, and has to be reworked. I can see now that I’m between a rock and that proverbial ‘hard place’. With a few presentations of this material, it would tighten up considerably, and the PAR would be much higher. However, with just one opportunity to get on stage each week, and occasionally missing four weeks in a row, as was the case in January, it’s hard to attain an optimum standard of quality. It would be best to do the same material every week, tweaking it each time, but I hate to subject an audience to continual re-runs! Oh well, I’ll just have to work on it!